Lockdown’s worst film
Once Upon a Time in London (16+, 111 mins)
Directed by Simon Rumley Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett★
Idon’t know if there is some unwritten code that outlines what a film-maker has to have in mind, before he gives his script (it’s always a him) a title with the unwieldy construction ‘‘Once Upon a Time in. . .’’, but I do know that of the Once Upon a Time films I have seen; Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a
Time in the West and
Once Upon a Time in America are wildly ambitious, densely populated and extraordinarily well-made.
Most of which also applies to Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
I’m not even as big a fan as most of Tarantino’s film but no-one who has seen it will ever die wondering where the money was spent.
So, I reckon, if you’re going to have the hubris and the chutzpah to make a film with the Once Upon
a Time in. . . moniker attached, then you should at least have in mind something on a grand scale, with a great yarn to recount and the resources to actually get your vision on to the screen.
What you should not do, under any circumstances, is turn in a shabby, dreary, nonsensical, poorly written, badly acted, tediously paced, and unintentionally funny load of old rubbish that completely botches its own source material.
That is exactly what the makers of Once Upon a Time in London have achieved.
Once Upon a Time in London is set between the late 1930s and 1950s, when Britain got its first taste of Italian and American-style organised crime, as two mobs fought for control of Britain’s lucrative black market and illegal gambling businesses – and for the ‘‘right’’ to carry out burglaries in the great city.
It’s an era familiar to anyone who’s seen the later series of the fictional, but pretty great Peaky Blinders.
But, Once Upon a Time in London absolutely squanders the potential of that rich history by reducing it to a series of incompetently staged set pieces.
Men sit in pubs and discuss what they are going to do to some unseen foe. Men rush in to buildings to beat or stab other men who are already there.
A jazz band noodles around on the soundtrack, while stupefyingly repetitious montages of violence and celebration judder across the screen. Heroically daft and unnecessary sex scenes drop in, for no discernible reason whatsoever. And then it all happens again.
Over the course of the film’s 111 minutes, I kind of gleaned that the leader of one gang had fallen out with the bloke who was once his trusted lieutenant.
But why, or how, or even why I should care, got utterly lost in the jumble of cheaply thrown together set pieces, apparently edited into some rough chronology by a drunk armed with only a machete and a roll of sticky tape.
Once Upon a Time in London isa botched film. The storytelling is inadequate, the lack of budget is glaring, the cinematography is perfunctory at best, and the soundtrack is an irritating and repetitive pastiche of mostly lousy songs.
But at least, if you do make it to the end of Once Upon a Time in
London, in a couple of weeks, when you’re back at your local and the conversation turns to ‘‘what was the worst film you endured in the lockdown?’’, you’ll have your answer ready.